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Special Educational Needs

As we are short of time, I will try to be brief. Some hon. Members would say I should make the Front Benchers wait—I, of course, would not. I am pleased to be associated with the Committee’s report. It is a particularly well-researched, thorough and detailed piece of work. In that context, I pay tribute to the Committee Clerk and team for their hard work and support for members of the Committee—I certainly found that support invaluable. I also recognise the contribution made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mrs. Dorries) who has now left the Committee. Her minority report was an interesting contribution to the overall debate, as was the chapter 5 submission of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich (Mr. Carswell). His championing of localism and parents does him enormous credit. I also pay tribute to members of the Committee on their diligence during a fairly long inquiry and for accepting so many of my amendments to the report. Despite being a very good report, most would agree, and have agreed in the debate, that the Government’s response is extremely disappointing. It amounts to a failure to recognise the severity and the scope of the issues raised. Most of the response was written before our report was published or had arrived at the Department for Education and Skills. Hon. Members will know that there have been other good reports from Ofsted, the National Audit Office and the Conservative party commission on special educational needs. When reading the Government response, I felt at times that I was reading a response to somebody else’s report. That would certainly explain some of the misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the Committee’s report. I, like the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr. Sheerman), felt dismayed by the Department’s defensive tone. While that may be an appropriate response for a Government agency or another political party’s report—although it would probably not be appropriate in those cases either—it is certainly not the response expected by a Select Committee endeavouring to get at the truth. I suspect that the Minister has felt some embarrassment while sitting in this Chamber and listening to hon. Members. It is not as if there were no large areas of common ground with the Government. There is as much in the report that we agree about as disagree about. The key difference is that the Government do not believe that the system has fundamental issues to address. I do, and clearly the Committee also believes that. The issue of inclusion ran through this inquiry like a stick of rock. I started with a critical view of inclusion, particularly regarding how it seemed to be coerced or forced on to some parents. Having considered the evidence and sat through the meetings, my view has changed. I now believe that no two children are alike and one child’s inclusion is another child’s prison. But inclusion in a local school may also be the best solution to fulfil that child’s needs. That view does have important caveats. The right level of support needs to be a place for every child. That is clearly not currently the case. There are many gaps at local level, for example, as the hon. Member for Blackpool, South (Mr. Marsden) said. During the inquiry we found that teacher training in special education needs was patchy to say the least. I want a much clearer commitment from the Government to ensuring that many more teachers entering the profession have the right level of training for special educational needs pupils and for those with major disabilities. Currently, many schools and teachers do not have the levels of expertise that they need to cope with the many demands placed on them. However, it should not just be the new teachers who get the training; it should be part of a continuing professional development and ingrained in the training and development budgets of schools. Many of the points about statementing have been made so, for brevity, I want to address the subject of exclusions, mentioned by the hon. Member for Barnsley, East and Mexborough (Jeff Ennis). Our report highlighted the high levels of exclusion among special educational needs and disabled pupils, and I am deeply troubled by the Government’s failure to address our points in detail. The figures are stark. The pupil level annual school census data for 2003-04 show that two thirds of exclusions are of special educational needs pupils. The Audit Commission has confirmed that. Like the hon. Member for Blackpool, South, I want gently to chastise the Government, as statistics used by them in the Education and Inspections Bill debates suggest that exclusions of SEN pupils are falling. I am referring to Government figures for 1997 to 2005, which reflect changes in the SEN code of practice which mean that many pupils are no longer recorded as having SEN. They are now simply not in the statistics. I hope that the Minister will answer my two specific points and deal with the wider issue of the need for fundamental reform of special educational needs provision. I remind him again that the report does not stand on its own, but is part of a long line of such findings. Our report is not negative or substantially different from the diagnosis made by other reviews. Therefore, one can only conclude that we are right that the problems are long standing and deep seated. I hope that the Minister will be conciliatory, but will also explain how and why the Government are right and every other major independent survey is wrong.